Quick test: should saying “Hitler, not a good guy” cause you to be banned from your social media account? Seems simple enough. But apparently not for Meta, the largest social media company on the planet.
I’ve talked about the Masnick Impossibility Theorem and the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Part of that explains why there will be a near constant stream of “mistakes” in content moderation. Sometimes this is because people just disagree over what is proper, and sometimes it’s just because the scale part means that mistakes will be made. Obvious, blindingly stupid responses.
Last year, we released the free Moderator Mayhem game, where players act as front line moderators for a social media review site, where they have to make a large number of important decisions under pressure. In one of the rounds, the player is told that a new “AI” driven moderation tool is being introduced, which is supposed to help pre-filter decisions.
When the AI moderator is introduced, the game immediately starts tossing up some hilariously mistaken decisions, often based on the sort of fairly obvious errors that a human would catch, but a computer might miss. For example, the AI blocks someone posting a review of a baseball pitcher because of the phrase “killer arm” and blocks a review of a chicken restaurant with the name “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo.” There are many more like that.
When the game first came out, I worried that some of these examples were a bit over the top. I worried that, as AI-driven tools got better, that portion of the game would feel increasingly unrealistic. However, I’m now thinking that this section of the game may have actually been even more accurate than I could have predicted.
Over the last few weeks, Meta’s attempt at microblogging, “Threads,” has been caught up in a few moderation scandals that seem pretty likely to have been caught up by terribly simplistic algorithmic bans. First, there was a story about how Threads was blocking and sometimes suspending users for mentioning the word “cracker” or “cracker jacks”:
Yes, in some contexts, the word “cracker” can be seen as a slur. But, most humans looking this over would recognize in context that it was not used that way here.
Then, more recently, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell found himself suspended for calling out a Washington Post colleague for criticizing Hitler. First WaPo’s Amanda Katz had posted something on Threads saying “Do… do people know what Hitler did” and got suspended.
Then, Harwell posted about Katz’s suspension, mentioning Hitler by saying “Threats suspended [Washington Post Opinions Editor Amanda Katz] for this. She tells me, “I stand by my views of Hitler. Not a good guy.” And Threads suspended him for that as well.
Harwell notes that the suspension happened almost immediately, again suggesting that Threads’ algorithmic checker has an auto-suspension for merely mentioning Hitler (which will certainly change the Godwin’s Law equation on Threads). This seemed particularly stupid given that the original was in response to Donald Trump literally praising Hitler.
Eventually, the accounts were restored. And, at least on the “cracker” case, Instagram/Threads boss Adam Mosseri claimed that the mistake came from human moderators who somehow were not provided the right tools to view the “context of how conversations played out.”
Sure, that can happen. I’ve talked in the past about the importance of understanding context, and how many content moderation failures are due to the lack of context. But it seems difficult to see how the largest social media company on the planet wouldn’t have tools in place that let you look at “I stand by my views of Hitler. Not a good guy” and think you don’t have the context to realize that post is probably not hate speech.
That said, some of this may also come down to the constant drumbeat and criticism of Meta over its moderation choices in the past. There’s a reason why the company has increasingly said that it doesn’t want to be a platform for discussing politics or the latest news (and actively downranks such content in its algorithms).
But also, come on. These kinds of mistakes are the sorts of things you’d expect to see in a brand new startup run by two dudes in a coffee shop, who hacked together some free-off-GitHub code to handle moderation. Not a company worth $1.5 trillion.
Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of “fediverse” platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It’s a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it’s still not entirely clear how “open” Meta is really going to be with Threads.
In the last few months, I’ve been to a few different gatherings that were heavily populated by Meta folks working on Threads where they’ve made it quite clear that they are earnest about embracing the ActivityPub standard, which we noted was an incredibly important step for Meta.
Every Meta product to date has been a closed, proprietary silo. Once you check in, your only way to check out is to leave the platform entirely, meaning you can no longer easily see posts from others on the platform or communicate with them as easily either. Embracing ActivityPub, a standardized decentralized protocol that allows for a more “federated” experience, was a big step towards a more protocolized world.
It was something Meta didn’t have to do, but it’s a move that could impact the wider thinking about how social media platforms operate and who actually controls the data.
Now, some users who rely on ActivityPub (mostly on Mastodon, but many other services as well) have been quite nervous about Meta’s embrace of ActivityPub, as there’s a legitimate fear of it overwhelming the system or causing problems. Or, if Meta wanted to be nefarious, the infamous Microsoft-endorsed strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish, was always lurking.
And while that’s always possible, there are a few reasons to be moderately optimistic. One reason is just that the folks at Meta working on this seem quite aware of that fear and are doing everything they can to minimize the risks and to be good neighbors in the wider fediverse. And while there is still some fear that maybe they only send out the nice, earnest believers to the meetings, while the real bastards are waiting behind the scenes, even if Meta did try to destroy ActivityPub, the nature of it being an open standard limits how much damage it could really do.
Some instances are already blocking Threads, and if Meta becomes too much of a problem, then others would likely do so as well.
And while some had predicted that Meta would never actually embrace Threads, it keeps turning on more functionality, bit by bit. The latest functionality is that users on Threads can now see likes and replies from the wider Fediverse. Before this, users on ActivityPub-based systems like Mastodon could follow Threads users who opted-in to connect to the Fediverse, but the users on Threads would not see any “likes” or replies. And now that’s changing.
This follows what Meta folks have suggested over the last few months of rolling out ActivityPub integration slowly and carefully, to make sure they really don’t overwhelm or break things.
I think all of this is good so far, and it’s good to see a major platform embracing more decentralized social media. But there are still some concerns.
Just a few weeks ago, in a conversation with some researchers about decentralized social media, I pointed out the one thing I’d really like to see, but hadn’t yet, from the Meta side: third-party clients and additional services built on top of Meta. But, to date, I hadn’t seen any.
And, a few days later, I learned one reason why. Over on Bluesky David Thiel pointed out that, last fall, Meta had big-time lawyers at Perkins Coie send cease and desist letters to developers building a Threads API client that would have enabled more third-party apps and services. And, indeed, you can see that threat letter on the unofficial Threads API Github.
There are a few ways to think about this. First, given how much shit that Meta got into (including massive fines) for the whole Cambridge Analytica mess, you can see why they might want to more tightly control any API access. And sending threat letters to unofficial API tools is one way to do that.
Also, one could argue that thanks to the increasing ActivityPub integration, those who want to build can just build something for ActivityPub and get access to any Threads content from users on Threads who turn on ActivityPub integration. So, arguably, the existing ActivityPub ecosystem can act as a third party to Threads.
But, even as Threads expands its ActivityPub integration, that solution is still quite limited.
So while it’s nice to see Threads really doing more to integrate with ActivityPub, it seems like its lack of true openness still suggests an inherently closed and centralized system, rather than a truly decentralized one.
Politics is messy, and you get the feeling that a lot of internet companies want nothing to do with “politics” of any kind. Back in 2019 Twitter (when it was still Twitter) decided to ban all political ads, a near-impossible task guaranteed to make a mess of things (such as banning “get out the vote” ads). Soon after, both Google and Facebook (when it was still Facebook) also cut back on political ads.
This was always interesting, because it disproves the idea that companies will do anything for revenue. The constant political fighting made it seem too much of a hassle to make money this way, so it was easier to just claim that all such ads were blocked.
But, there’s a big problem with this approach — as we saw with the trouble with the ad bans earlier: how the hell do you define what’s “political”? Sure, some “politics” is obvious. Things about politicians running for office? Easy call. But it gets more and more difficult as things go.
Is an ad about the environment political? About healthcare? Libraries? In some contexts, yes. In others, maybe not?
We’re debating this again as Meta keeps insisting that it will not promote “political” content on Threads (which is sort of what would happen if Twitter and Instagram had a lovechild, where you might be surprised which genes the offspring got from which parent app). From early on Threads/Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has made it clear that he doesn’t want the site to be big for political content.
That’s gotten more attention in the last few weeks as the company said it’s tuning its algorithm to downplay political content (though you can opt back into it, if you want it).
But that leaves open the same question we discussed above: how the hell do they define “political” content? As you move outside of the ads space, it gets even more complicated. These days, your choice of food products or clothing can be considered political. What books you buy? What music you like? Where you live? All of them are possibly political. People’s very identities are often politicized.
How do you downplay your identity?
Many people have been asking, but Meta’s response to most reporters has been evasive. The company has now given a little more guidance to the Washington Post, but I’m not sure it helps much:
So far, the company has offered only clues about where it will draw those lines. In a blog post announcing the policy, Instagram described political content as “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.” Laws and elections seem clear-cut enough, as categories go, but “social topics” leaves a lot of room for guesswork.
In a statement to The Tech 202, Meta spokeswoman Claire Lerner offered a bit more detail.
“Social topics can include content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime,” she said. She added that Meta will work continually to refine its definition over time.
Got that? It’s “potentially related to things like laws, elections or social topics” where social topics is “content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others.” Though this definition may need to be “refined” over time.
Yeah, so, that doesn’t clear up much of anything. Indeed it’s about as clear as mud.
Now, some of this is the very nature of content moderation. It is a constant game of taking wholly subjective rules about what is and what is not allowed, and having to apply them in a manner that pretends to be objective. It’s not possible to do well at scale.
But, based on this, it sounds like anything around climate change, mental health, poverty, housing, traffic, etc. could all be deemed “political.” Of course, it’s not clear to me that things like banning books in schools and libraries quite meet this definition? What about talking about the First Amendment? Or the Second Amendment? Or the Fourteenth.
The reality is that the politics here is in the deciding. By announcing that it will downplay political content, Meta is just shifting the issue. Rather than worrying about people fighting over politics on Threads (which will still happen), now they can also fight over Meta’s ever-evolving definition of what content is, and is not, political.
The very act of promising to downplay political content is, inherently, political content itself.
I can understand the desire to cut politics out as a platform, but it’s hard to see how this works in any reasonable way in practice. There are always politics around, and Meta is opening itself up to widespread criticism no matter how it defines politics, because each such decision will now be a political one — not by Meta’s users, but by Meta itself.
Today is the official one year anniversary of Elon getting control over what used to be called Twitter, and now is simply exTwitter. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but in a sign of what was to come, Elon and his buddies maneuvered to close the deal in the afternoon a day early, just to maximize their assholish tendencies.
The closing of the Twitter deal had been scheduled for that Friday. An orderly transition had been scripted for the opening of the stock market that morning. The money would transfer, the stock would be delisted, and Musk would be in control. That would permit Agrawal and his top Twitter deputies to collect severance and have their stock options vest.
But Musk decided that he did not want that. On the afternoon before the scheduled close he methodically planned a jiu-jitsu maneuver: He would force a fast close that night. If his lawyers and bankers timed everything right, he could fire Agrawal and other top Twitter executives “for cause” before their stock options could vest.
It was audacious, even ruthless. But it was justified in Musk’s mind because of his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him. “There’s a 200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” he told me late Thursday afternoon in the war room as the plan unfolded.
Of course, it was never true that Twitter management misled Elon. What is true is that Elon didn’t bother to do even the most basic due diligence (and, in fact, waived the right to do so), and signed a contract which basically everyone admits was a massive overpay, that also saddled the company with significant debt.
If we take stock of how things are looking one year in, it can be summed up simply by saying “not great, Bob.” Musk told bankers that he had a clear plan to get the company to be worth $250 billion before long, and the bankers bought it. But so far, basically none of his plan worked. The pitchdeck claimed that he would quadruple revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028. Instead, he’s cut it by at least 60%.
He said he’d more than triple users to 900 million by 2028. Instead, user numbers have been dropping. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal got access to some more data (beyond what we had in the previous post) showing that exTwitter seems alone in losing users, as other sites are gaining them:
Also, you see how it was a gradual decline, and then a steeper cliff after July? Want to know why that is? It coincides, almost exactly, with Musk’s big “rebrand” to “X.”
These aren’t issues of “market conditions” or things that were screwed up through outside forces. Every one of the problems stems directly from Elon Musk having no fucking clue what he’s doing.
He claimed he’d increase average revenue per user by $5.39, and his big idea there seems to have been to co-opt Twitter Blue (which had the kernel of a good idea, but wasn’t marketed very well by old Twitter) and turn it into X Premium (while also, ridiculously, getting rid of actual verification and pretending that X Premium was verification). And that program cannot be described as anything but a colossal failure, with even those who were interested in paying gradually losing interest in continuing. The value just isn’t there.
The best estimate I’ve seen for how many people are paying for X premium is somewhere around a million people. This is well less than half a percent of Twitter’s claimed user base. Now, converting people to premium offerings is always harder than people think, but less than half a percent is embarrassing. Those are the kinds of results that gets people fired. It also means that Elon gave up something in the range of $2.5 to $3 billion in ad revenue… to get back about $100 million in subscription numbers. That’s… bad.
So, no, it does not look like the ARPU numbers are going up to $5.39, and I doubt the plan to charge $1/year for everyone is going to help.
Of course, the banks who lent Elon all this money are now pissed off. They’ve been unable to unload the loans like they’d planned, and are recognizing just how much money they’ve lost on this deal. Apparently, the banks own investors are asking how the banks could have been so fucking stupid to loan Elon money for Twitter:
The X deal should have been a fee bonanza for the banks, who stood to earn tens of millions of dollars on the debt. Instead, their inability to resell it has been an albatross on their lending businesses and prompted questions from their own investors.
Banks limit how much risk they take on at any given time, so holding X’s debt has taken up loan-book capacity that their deal makers would prefer to allocate elsewhere.
But really, the banks have no one to blame but themselves. Too many people fell for the myth of Elon having the Midas Touch, and insisted that he was some sort of ultra genius who could turn any company he touched to gold. But it was fucking obvious from the jump that no matter how much he might have (or might not have) contributed to his other companies, he never had the slightest fucking clue how social media works.
And the astounding thing is that one year in, it’s clear he’s still learned nothing.
Most social media startup CEOs end up going through the learning curve. Eventually, they figure things out. Sometimes it’s too late. But, by the end, they start to understand the basics. The incredible thing with Elon is that he doesn’t appear to have learned anything from his mistakes here.
Perhaps more tragic is that he’s basically destroyed what had been the best place to go for rapid breaking news coverage and analysis. While Twitter was always smaller than the other platforms, it made up for it in being the best “real time” source of news when something big was happening. But, as we’ve learned over the past few weeks, going to exTwitter to find out what’s happening with, say, Israel/Palestine or with the shooting in Maine is an utter disaster. Musk himself initially promoted two grifter accounts with a history of posting completely false nonsense to follow about the Israel/Palestine situation, and given that many more respected/trustworthy news purveyors have reasonably abandoned or limited their use of the platform, exTwitter’s greatest value is basically gone.
That said, he has inspired some unique experimentation in the social media space. At the six month anniversary of the takeover, I wrote about what appeared to be the three big “contenders” to take over the void that Twitter had left open for real time news. Six months later, and there are still tons of interesting things happening. I feel like Mastodon lost a ton of its early momentum by being effectively hostile to people who wanted a new Twitter-like space. I think it’s clear that the team behind Mastodon has realized it needed to adapt, but it feels a little like Mastodon is going to be saddled with being the “Linux” of short form social media: never quite going mainstream, no matter how often its many fans (and I remain one) insist that it’s not as hard to use as you’ve heard.
The new entrant since that post six months ago is Threads, from Meta/Instagram. That obviously hit the market with a huge splash and tons of hype, and then… lost a lot of its momentum, and has been trying to rebuild a space for itself in the market. There have been reports lately that suggest maybe it’s finding its footing, but it still seems a bit shakey. Some of the problem is that it still doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. At times it acts like it wants to be the Twitter replacement, but then the people behind it keep saying that they’re downplaying the discussion of news on the platform, mainly because they know it gets impossible to moderate. But that also makes people who do want to discuss the news feels somewhat unwelcome.
The big unknown, of course, is if Meta ever actually lives up to its stated plan to federate Threads with ActivityPub, enabling Mastodon users (and users of other Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub implementations) to communicate with people on Threads. People at Meta insist it’s still a part of the plan, and that could be really interesting depending on how it’s implemented. But we just don’t know the details yet.
Six months ago, I had also mentioned nostr, which remains a fun project in its complete embrace of openness, but the project’s leaders seem so naive about what it takes to set up a social media protocol that it’s driving away basically anyone who doesn’t want to just talk crypto all day. I’m still hopeful for interesting projects to come out of nostr, because it has some advantages over the alternatives, but for now it’s just not getting usage outside of a niche.
And then, there’s Bluesky. This remains the one that I’m most hopeful about, and where I’m spending more and more of my time. Six months ago it only had around 100k users, and now it just surpassed 1.75 million, with over 1 million users having posted on the platform at least once. And that’s with it still being gated by an invitation system. I’m unaware of any invite-only app that has gotten that big.
It’s also the one that feels the most like early Twitter.
And also, it’s the one that is clearly thinking about how to actually function as a mainstream platform in the real world, while still setting itself up to be decentralized and not just beholden to whoever controls the company. A few months ago, someone from Bluesky explained that they saw their own future company as a potential threat, and were designing accordingly. Of course, it’s one thing to say that, and it’s another to do it. So far, they’ve been talking the talk, but at some point they need to start walking the walk too. I’m still confident they will, but I know some are quite skeptical. Once Bluesky finally goes federated, we’ll see if they can really find the right balance.
And so, one year in, it’s pretty safe to say that Elon Musk has been truly great at inspiring new and creative ides for better social media platforms. Just not his own.
This week, Jordan sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, demanding he reveal a bunch of information regarding how Meta’s new Twitter-competitor is handling moderation:
The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech. In furtherance of this oversight, on February 15, 2023, the Committee issued a subpoena to you compelling the production of documents related to content moderation and Meta’s engagements with the Executive Branch. In light of Meta’s introduction of a new social media platform, “Threads,” we write to inform you that it is the Committee’s view that the subpoena of February 15 covers material to date relating to Threads.
Now, imagine if the Democrats were in control over the House, and they formed a committee that sent a similar subpoena to Fox News or to the NY Post “compelling” either of those orgs to detail how it made editorial choices, what stories it would cover, what opinion writers it would publish, or what stories would go on the front page with what headlines?
People would (rightly!) be up in arms over it, calling out a gross violation of the 1st Amendment, in which the government was demanding to interfere in 1st Amendment protected editorial choices.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. Content moderation decisions by companies are editorial choices, protected by the 1st Amendment, and Congress (or any government officials) has no business getting involved.
Hilariously, the letter points to the ruling in Louisiana that argued that the Biden administration unfairly sought to influence moderation decisions as a reason why Meta must reveal its editorial policies to the government.
Given that Meta has censored First Amendment-protected speech as a result of government agencies’ requests and demands in the past, the Committee is concerned about potential First Amendment violations that have occurred or will occur on the Threads platform. Indeed, Threads raises serious, specific concerns because it has been marketed as rival of Elon Musk’s Twitter, which has faced political persecution from the Biden Administration following Musk’s commitment to free speech. In contrast, there are reports that Threads will enforce “Instagram’s community guidelines,” which resulted in lawful speech being moderated following pressure by the government. Despite launching only 12 days ago, there are reports that Threads is already engaging in censorship, including censoring users but offering no grounds for appeal.
Now, remember, in that ruling, Judge Terry Doughty explicitly called out as pernicious “the power of the government to pressure social-media platforms to change their policies and to suppress free speech.” Now tell me how this letter is not abusing the power of government to pressure Meta to change its policies and suppress free speech?
For what it’s worth, almost everything Jordan writes in the paragraph above is bullshit. Threads’ decisions on moderation are not a 1st Amendment violation, because Meta is a private company and can moderate how it sees fit. Not having an appeal option may be stupid, but it’s none of the government’s business.
Also, I legitimately laughed outloud reading the line about Elon Musk’s “commitment to free speech.” Remember, he’s been suspending journalist accounts when they say stuff he doesn’t like. Most recently he took down Aaron Greenspan’s accounts, after Greenspan had become a thorn in his side. What “commitment to free speech”?
Anyway, the whole thing is exactly what Jordan pretends he wants to stop. So, again, anyone defending this absolute bullshit needs to answer how they would feel if a subcommittee headed by, say, Rep. Adam Schiff, were sending identical letters and subpoenas to Fox News, how would they react? It would be wrong for Schiff to do that, and it’s wrong now for Jordan to be doing this and anyone who actually believes in the 1st Amendment should be calling out this kind of bullshit.
The tech press often gets called out for lazy journalism, and here we have yet another example. On Monday, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri posted that due to an influx of spam on Threads (and there’s been a lot), the company was tightening up its rate limits:
He said:
Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up those protections let us know.
Given that there was just a big hullabaloo about Twitter rate limiting views for some questionable reasons, many in the tech press world went for the layup, claiming that Threads was “copying” Twitter.
And, of course, even Elon Musk couldn’t resist pretending that this vindicated his rate limiting, responding to someone showing a screenshot of hitting a rate limit on Threads by saying “seems oppressive.”
But claiming that changing the rate limits on Threads is copying Twitter is lazy, misleading, and wrong. Every social media website has some form of rate limiting to deal with actual spam. But the rate limiting is generally for spam-like activities. For example: automated posting that posts hundreds of times in a row. Or automated signups of multiple accounts. Or mass followings. Basically spam like activities.
Rate limiting for things like that is standard practice that basically any social media site is going to have in its bag of tricks to deal with spammers.
The thing that Musk did with Twitter was different: it was rate limiting posts viewed, which makes no sense at all, especially on a social media platform where ad views are so important. There is no indication that Threads is using rate limiting on post views. Even in the screenshot above, it notes that the rate limits are for things “like following people.” That’s standard anti-spam protection.
There is a real difference between standard rate limiting and ridiculously stupid rate limiting, and anyone reporting on this stuff should know the difference, but some are too eager to go with the easy story, rather than the right story.
As you almost certainly know, earlier this month, Meta released Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service. There are rumors that the company rushed the launch, pushing it up a few weeks to try to capitalize on the latest nonsense at Twitter. And, it seemed to work (to some extent) in that the company was able to quickly scale to 100 million signups in just a few days. Of course, it had help. This was all piggybacked on the Instagram social graph, which has over 2 billion users.
Still, one thing that likely held back even wider adoption was that Meta barred EU residents from using Threads. While many people assumed that this was due to a lack of GDPR compliance (since the GDPR is the EU law many Americans are most familiar with), it was pretty clear from the beginning that the actual culprit was the upcoming DMA, or Digital Markets Act.
While we’ve talked a lot about the DSA, or Digital Services Act, we haven’t talked quite as much about the DMA, which is a similar kind of law, but focused on online “marketplace.” Whereas the DSA designates some platforms to face stricter rules by declaring them VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms), under the DMA, the similar designation is for “Gatekeepers” and as a July 4th present, the EU named basically all the US “big tech” companies as gatekeepers: Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. TikTok and Samsung were also named.
This means that additional rules regarding how those companies can launch new products will come into effect shortly, including blocking the ability to leverage data from one product to another, which seems to be what Meta is most concerned about.
I’ve spoken to a few EU legal and policy experts who say it’s not at all clear that launching Threads in the EU would, in any way, violate the DMA, and Meta keeps harping on “regulatory uncertainty” as a reason for why. One legal expert I spoke to on background noted that they thought this was really just a way for Meta to highlight some of the negative consequences of the DMA: letting the EU know that they’re now second class citizens for new services.
“The fact that Threads is still not available for EU citizens shows that EU regulation works,” said Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker, according to Politico last week. “I hope Meta will make sure all rules are covered and complied with before opening up for EU citizens.”
And, I guess your view on whether or not it’s working for EU citizens, or punishing EU citizens, truly depends on (1) if you think having access to new services is important, and (2) if you think that complying with things like the DMA will actually do anything useful for folks in the EU.
Don’t try to sign up for Threads through a virtual private network (VPN) if you live in Europe. Meta has confirmed that it’s blocking European Union users from accessing the new social network through a VPN. As consultant Matt Navarra explains, content, notifications and profiles won’t load properly. Some users say they can use Threads without a VPN if they’d previously signed up with one, but you may not want to count on that loophole working.
In a statement, Meta says it’s taking “further measures” to stop people from accessing Threads in European countries where the app is unavailable. The company nonetheless says Europe remains a “very important market” and that it hopes to expand availability in the future.
The fact that so many EU users were using VPNs to access Threads — at least enough of them to catch Meta’s attention — certainly suggests they felt that it was more important for them to be able to access this new service than to be “protected” by whatever requirements Meta is expected to put in place to comply with the DMA.
While I do think there are some interesting aspects to the DMA (especially around interoperability requirements, though it remains to be seen how well those will actually work), this seems to once again highlight the EU approach to tech regulation, being about restricting innovation until the bureaucrats say it’s okay. You can argue that leads to safer outcomes, but it’s hard to see how that will lead to better overall outcomes, as it will slow innovation down, and leave many in the EU cut off from services and features that the rest of the world enjoys.
Elon’s legal lapdog, Alex Spiro, dashed off a threat letter so dumb that even his employer, Quinn Emanuel — who is famous among powerful law firms for having no shame at all — should feel shame.
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:
I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”). Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched “Threads” app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (“Meta”) has engaged in systemic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Lol, wut? Threads is like a dozen other microblogging type services. There are no “trade secrets” one needs to misappropriate from Twitter. I mean, seriously, who in their right mind thinks that Meta with billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is learning anything from Twitter, beyond “don’t do the dumbshit things Elon keeps doing.”
Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat “Threads” app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Let’s break this one down, because holy shit, is it ever stupid. The reason that Meta was able to hire a bunch of former Twitter employees most likely had to do with the fact that Elon recklessly fired 85% of the existing staff, and did so willy nilly, destroying tons of institutional knowledge and knowhow. And yet, Musk claimed he had to get rid of these employees because they were not hardcore, and were useless to Twitter. Yet, now we’re being told they are somehow invaluable to Threads? That doesn’t even pass the most basic laugh test.
The claim that “these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices” is particularly ridiculous, given that I’ve spoken to many, many, many ex-Twitter employees who have spent months trying to return their laptops, without Twitter bothering to respond to them at all. To use that against those employees is ridiculous.
And, really, what fucking “trade secrets” or “intellectual property’ do Spiro and Musk honestly think that any former employees took with them to Meta? How to competently run a microblogging service? This is all bluff and bluster from Elon, who knows he’s fucked up Twitter and is scared of any competition.
On top of that, assuming any of those employees are in California, then state law for the last century and a half has prohibited arguments regarding non-competes or similar, because the state has a stated policy that people should be allowed to be employed. So, to the extent that Twitter thinks it can enforce some sort of quasi-non-compete agreement, that’s just not going to fly.
Update: Also, Meta has now said that none of the small team working on Threads is a former Twitter employee anyway, so the assumptions in the letter are entirely false.
The letter continues:
Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.
In short, even as we’re not paying many of our bills and are desperately short on cash, especially compared to Meta, which has a building full of litigators, we’re ready, able, and willing to file a completely bogus, vexatious lawsuit just to try to annoy you.
Then we get to the real fear: that Meta might make it easy to recreate your Twitter social graph on threads:
Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data. As set forth in Twitter’s Terms of Service, crawling any Twitter services — including, but not limited to, any Twitter websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services — is permissible only “if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file” available at https://twitter.com/robots.txt. The robots.txt file specifically disallows crawling of Twitter’s followers or following data. Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter’s prior consent. Twitter reserves all rights, including but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies or injunctive relief without further notice.
So, yeah. This letter is basically Elon publicly admitting he’s scared shitless of Threads and its potential impact on Twitter. This is a “holy shit, this is bad, we’re fucked” kinda letter. Not one from a position of strength. Honestly, this letter makes me think that Threads has a better chance than I initially expected, if Musk is so damn scared of it.
Of course, to date, I’ve seen no indication that Threads was looking to scrape Twitter or enable easy transfer of the Twitter social graph to threads. Of course, lots of third parties often create such tools, and we’ve already seen Elon freak out over tools that helped users find their Twitter social graph on Mastodon, so I guess this is how he competes. By throwing up bogus walls.
That said, Meta can’t really say much here. After all, it set one of the horrible precedents in court regarding scraping data from websites to build services on top of them. To the extent that Twitter actually has any legal power to stop Meta from scraping, that power was given to it via a bad lawsuit that Meta itself started and pushed to completion.
Though, again, there’s been no indication that Meta actually plans to do that. The fact that it’s able to bootstrap its network off of the (much, much, much larger than Twitter) Instagram network suggests it has no need to port Twitter’s social graph over.
Again, this legal threat letter appears to be legal bluster from the much weaker party of the two.
I doubt this turns into an actual legal dispute, though with Elon, you never really know. If it does turn into a live dispute however, assuming that Meta didn’t do something preposterously silly (like asking former Twitter employees to share internal documents), then Meta will destroy this lawsuit easily.
But, you know, if we’re going to see a cage match between these two billionaires, why not just throw this on the undercard as well.
As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to this is the microblogging equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying “how do you do, fellow kids.”
Clearly, lots of people were willing to check it out. Mark Zuckerberg (on Threads) claimed that 2 million people signed up in just the first few hours.
Of course, I got that screenshot on the web (which lets you see things, but not login or post to Threads). When I tried to get a copy of it from the mobile app where you can actually post, I got this:
So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.
By this morning, Zuck was saying Threads had 30 million signups in its first day.
I mean, that’s what you get for bootstrapping on a social network and social graph that already has over 2 billion users. Some are complaining that this is an example of Meta leveraging its “dominant” position to enter a new market, but as I explain below, I don’t think this is so bad, because the open protocol nature of this means it’s actually resistant to the worst potential exploitation.
I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop. I have no real crystal ball on how it will do, and people who are insisting that one outcome or the other is inevitable are just guessing, so they can claim they knew it all along when whatever happens, happens.
What Meta does have, though, is the ability to scale this. While there is a relatively small team working on it, apparently just “a few dozen” Instagram employees, Meta does have the infrastructure in place to scale if it does catch on, which still remains a challenge for basically everyone else.
And, it’s not just the technical infrastructure, but the trust and safety infrastructure as well. Not that I think anyone is going to say that Meta has been particularly good at handling trust and safety challenges, but they have people and they have technology… and (importantly) they have experience.
But, still, the bigger, and more important part here, is just the fact this is built on ActivityPub. Back in December, I talked about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment,” where a big company steps in and offers a better UI, better features, and a simpler onboarding setup.
While a bunch of mid-sized companies have embraced ActivityPub, including Mozilla, Medium, and Flipboard, Meta is in a different league altogether. And that has both advantages and disadvantages.
But, the important point to me, and the one thing that matters, is that this shows that big companies can make use of interoperable protocols to build on, rather than building up silos. While Threads does not currently interoperate with the rest of the fediverse, the company has made clear that it intends to do so at some point, and even included this fact in the splash screen when you first setup Threads:
And that’s important. For the last two decades, the big internet companies have mostly focused on building their own proprietary silos, rather than using open protocols and interoperating.
Now, it’s true that some of the new European regulations coming into force put pressure on tech companies to interoperate more, but it remains to be seen how well that actually works (and notably, Threads is not available in the EU, as they found it impossible to currently comply with GDPR requirements). What is clear and is notable, is that this is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a “big tech” company embrace an open protocol.
And, yes, some people fear that the goal is to “embrace, extend, extinguish,” to use the old Microsoft playbook. But the nice thing about protocols is it actually creates incentives against doing so. Because of its open nature, if you don’t like where Meta is going with threads, you can go elsewhere. But you can do so without losing your ability to communicate with those in your network who remain on Threads.
That’s powerful and it’s how the internet was always supposed to work, but which we’ve gone away from.
Indeed, one way to look at this is that it’s Meta bringing many millions of new people to the protocol-based decentralized social media world. And even if plenty stay within Meta’s private park, it will allow those outside the network to communicate with those inside, and also to highlight how they can get the same basic thing without having to cough up data to Meta.
So, I’m personally not that excited about Threads as a product, nor am I all that worried about it doing something bad for the fediverse. I am excited that it shows how big companies can make use of open protocols in a manner that keeps the internet more open, enabling communication not just within a single silo, but where the users have more control, rather than a single centralized company.
Having more of that is a good thing.
And, while I know a bunch of Mastodon instances are planning to defederate from Threads as soon as it connects to the wider fediverse, I think the statement put out by Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is actually quite thoughtful about all this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
I agree completely. This is validation of open protocols and pushing power to the ends of the network, rather than just another silo. That, alone, is a good thing that should be celebrated.
